Lamp of Aladdin

Whether you regard Aladdin as a sword-swinging hero or humble prince, get ready to have that image forever altered. In Lamp of Aladdin, the title character is portrayed as a snotty teenager who looks like he’s had plastic surgery. His quest is to pick fruit from the tree of life in order to marry the princess. Due to his rotten attitude, Aladdin gets the repetitive journey he deserves.

Lamp of Aladdin is broken into two sections that alternate each level. One is a hidden object game where you must find pieces of broken items and, after putting them back together, use the item somewhere in the scene. Each scene has four items to recreate.

The other part of the game is a side-scrolling Match-3. You must create matches on top of gold tiles in order to uncover a path for Aladdin. Along the way you’ll hit dead ends where you need to match special tiles to summon a magic carpet or bridge. There are also hammers, bombs, and whirlwinds that remove gems from the board.

Riffraff, street rat, I don’t buy that.

Each Match-3 level consists of around eight sub-levels, plus a bonus level. Altogether, a Match-3 round can take up to an hour. After playing these again and again without much variation, it can get old quite quickly.

You can play through Lamp of Aladdin with or without a timer. We generally feel timers add little to the challenge but a lot to the stress factor, so we opted out of it.

The story is told through picture-based cutscenes between levels. All the dialogue is voice acted, although you’ll likely turn off the voices after the first word, since they’re unbearably bad.

While Lamp of Aladdin has some interesting concepts, it’s far too tedious. For $4.99, we have a hard time recommending it unless you don’t mind performing the same few tasks for hours on end.

The story of Aladdin and his genie-filled lamp has been told many times, but never, to our knowledge, in the form of a Match-3/ hidden object game. As it turns out, these two genres compliment each other nicely, making Lamp of Aladdin an enjoyable experience for anyone in the family (except maybe the mopey teen, who will think it’s too childish).

Each level starts with a beautifully painted hidden object puzzle. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see four items that have been broken into pieces and scattered around the painting. Once you locate all the pieces of an item, you’ll be able to use that item to manipulate the scene. For instance, one of the items might be a weight, and once you assemble the weight you’ll have to hang it on a hook to open a curtain, which will reveal pieces of the other items.

The rest of each level is made up of a series of Match-3 puzzles. In these, a tiny Aladdin is trying to make his way along a path through a grid of gems. To unblock the path, you must shuffle gems around to form lines of three of the same color. Doing this over Aladdin’s blocked path opens up the route, allowing him to progress. It’s a very typical Match-3 game, but helping Aladdin make his way through it freshens the gameplay somewhat.

So far, we’re enjoying Lamp of Aladdin quite a bit. The high production values are evident in the art and in the mostly spot-on voice acting between levels. The game seems primarily aimed at kids and casual gamers, but even hardcore folks will probably find something to enjoy here. If you have an iPad and a few extra bucks, you might want to pick it up.

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

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Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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